Melancholy in lieu of Recantation: Ezra Pound’s “Drafts and Fragments” by Hélène Aji From the clinical point of view, melancholy is this moment of stasis in between two active stages in the development of depression, a moment of transition in which the patient measures the extent of his suffering and recognizes his powerlessness in despair and often in silence. First medical descriptions and diagnoses of melancholy date back to Hippocrates, and the detailed enumerations of its symptoms are also to be found in literature, be it through the observation of others or as a result of introspection. In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Achilles’ narcissistic figure, confining in egotism, solipsistic isolation and sociopathic cruelty, is but one of many examples. However, when the melancholic state becomes part of an individual’s self-portrayal, as is often the case with Romantic melancholy, there arises the issue of drawing the line between what would be the discourse of (produced by) melancholy and the discourse of (staging or commenting on) melancholy. This dichotomy, and the whole gamut of literary possibilities it implies from the tragic voice of the undone self to the playful ironic stance of the distanced self-conscious author remain operative in the Modernist text, outlining a space characterized by ambiguity and undecidability. This is the domain of “haunted” Modernism, as Jean-Michel Rabaté defines it when he evokes Ezra Pound’s work after the fall of the Mussolini’s regime in The Ghosts of Modernity: The poet gives voice to various ghosts or shades who write their fate or fame through him. In the opening lines of the Pisan Cantos, when Pound contemplates Mussolini’s corpse, a dead leader identified with Dionysos, the post-Nietzschean collapsing of “Dionysos or the Crucified” into one single, composite, suffering body is suggested by the name “Diogenes,” punned as “digenes” or “digonos,” meaning twice- born. Made up of ghostly doublings, Pound’s mythical fascism provides a deeper insight into the nature of our century’s politics. (xvi) The aim here is not to return to the issue of Pound’s politics, although it will appear by the end of my argument that any reflection on Pound’s absence of recantation after the collapse of the fascist regime in Italy–a regime which he had forcefully and unambiguously supported–and on his adopting a melancholic stance does have serious political consequences, since both might have had political motivations. By arguing the Modernist “impossibility of mourning” (Rabaté, Ghosts of Modernity xvi), thus barring the possibility of recantation and opening up the possibility of melancholy, Rabaté opts in favor of a Pound that suffers from the narcissistic wound of his political errors, and from the Pisan Cantos on unfolds the specific rhetoric of what could be called a discourse of melancholy. My argument will be that the rhetoric of melancholy is part of Pound’s defensive project of his œuvre, designed to erase the controversial referent that had become the core of his Cantos by the 1930s, but in no way rejecting it. A short biographical and psychoanalytical detour At this juncture the temptation of clinical description and psychoanalytical evaluation is strong to enlighten not only contextual biographical data, but also and above all the evolution of Pound’s Cantos after World War II. Approaching this material as a set of symptoms, one can indeed recognize in the collapse of Pound’s megalomaniac projects the key factor in the onset of melancholic retreat as well as veiled aggression–both of which become expressed in the increasingly fragmented, decontextualized, and formulaic patterns of the later cantos. There would be stages of temporary and partial megalomania which make him construct his persona as center of the Modernist revolution in London when most data places him on the margins of this revolution. A good example would be the creation of Vorticism which is but a spin-off, albeit an officially vindictive and oppositional spin-off, of Futurism. The perception of a failure in this initial, artistic, enterprise would be what triggered further exilic choices leading him to Italy in the 1920s, and the turn to politics as a substitute for poetics. Henri Gaudier-Brezska’s Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound followed him everywhere as a reminder of the poet’s choice of a hieratic self and as the objective correlative of his desire to acquire the hieratic signature of a master. Aji, Hélène. “Melancholy in lieu of Recantation: Ezra Pound’s ‘Drafts and Fragments’.” EREA 4.1 (printemps 37 2006): 37-42. <www.e-rea.org> Signing Ezra Pound in correspondence with the portrait made by same Gaudier thus confers to the poet the stature of a genius, the “maestro di color che sanno,” which he thought Eliot to be and longed himself to become in a manner very akin to the behavior of one of Annie Reich’s patient, which she evokes as follows: Ou encore, si le niveau du Moi est plus primitif, on peut assister à un abandon partiel de l’épreuve de réalité, et l’état du sujet peut être décrit comme une mégalomanie partielle et passagère. Sans avoir perdu le contact avec la réalité, ces personnes ont le sentiment d’être l’équivalent de leur idéal narcissique, quel qu’il soit. Exemple: un malade, que son Moi infantile et des difficultés névrotiques ont écarté de la réussite professionnelle, s’exerce pendant des heures à signer “comme un banquier.” Tout en ayant pleinement conscience de ses échecs dans le domaine de la réalité, le fait de tracer une signature “importante” lui procure une satisfaction, comme s’il était le président d’une banque. (151) In Pisa Ezra Pound cannot any longer ensure this modicum of satisfaction, which the pre-war Rapallo-based Ezuniversity, the wartime bigamist balance between Dorothy Shakespear and Olga Rudge, and the wartime radio speeches had provided. The semblance of immersion in the world and of involvement with the business of the world is irredeemably suppressed in such a way that the hatred of the United Sates–once a personal fiction born of being rejected by the academic world, both as a teacher and as a researcher in the Romance languages–becomes disturbingly motivated by what he can now construe as actual persecution. Unable to tolerate guilt, Pound thus would turn to further hostility to his own country and undying devotion to the place which has come to embody if not his actual greatness at least what he sees as his times of grandeur. This would be corroborated by his decision to hail Italy with the Fascist salute as sailing into Naples harbor as late as in 1952, a powerful sign of his continuing allegiance to the megalomaniac totalitarian ideology to which he has identified. This aggressive posturing as well as this obstinacy in errors demonstrated by the course of history are to be linked to an inability to recant and the choice of the position of the persecuted to sustain this denegation. In Paula Heimann’s words: La difficulté d’une personne à tolérer le sentiment de culpabilité vient essentiellement de sa difficulté à admettre, même pour elle-même, qu’il y a quelque chose de mauvais en elle, c’est-à-dire que quelque chose d’elle-même est mauvais, et qu’elle ne peut s’en défaire en traitant ce quelque chose comme un corps étranger à l’intérieur d’elle-même. Le résultat de la technique de projection délirante est double : la crainte de la persécution de la part de la personne qui est choisie pour cette projection, et la conviction de la bonté de ce qui est senti comme faisant partie du sujet. On pourrait dire que l’individu achète son estime de lui-même au prix de la persécution. (214) The horrifying life conditions of a war prisoner in the Disciplinary Training Center can indeed appear to one who refuses the intimation of personal responsibility for his failures as the final proof of a lasting persecution, one which will only be worsened by repatriation, the threat of a trial, and psychiatric incarceration. Interestingly enough, the very motive for psychiatric incarceration is alternately seen by biographers as a ploy to avoid capital punishment for high treason and as the medical response to an actual mental break-down. Here is not the place to examine the arguments in favor or against this or that account of Pound’s life, but rather to see how the poetry can be read as working at this ambivalence in a strategy which is perhaps rather a defence and reconstruction of the poetic persona than an actual voicing of this persona’s regrets and reflexive questioning. A discourse of melancholy then which would allow to bypass recantation. Melancholy as a mask This is why the case of Ezra Pound’s work, and particularly of what comes to the fore in his later poetry, remains the locus of much critical debate and hesitation. A quick return to his first poems, the shorter poems contained in Lustra or in Ripostes, shows melancholy not so much as a state of the poet, not so much then as a momentary stasis in a process of escalating neurosis than as a strategy using the signs of melancholy so as to further the poet’s agenda as a poet. The intertextual choices of Latin love poetry, Provençal troubadour lore, classical Chinese verse, or Dantean inspiration combine to form the outline of a neo-Romantic Modernist poet borrowing from the traditions that will either guarantee or energize his own project. If it so happens that these traditions possess a melancholic tonality, it does not seem obvious that this tonality, in Aji, Hélène.